Bird Box Challenge: Tools to Hone Your Other 4 Senses

The first step towards super hearing: digging up and dumping out all the crap that's built up in your ears. Elephant Ear, which looks like a bottle of Windex with a hose for a spout...oh wait, it's a trunk! Ha! I figured it was called Elephant Ear just because it's for people with elephantine quantities of wax clogging their canals, but this makes the name doubly awesome!

So the Elephant Ear bottle system has a trunk that inserts into the opening of a waxy ear and then guides the flow of a peroxide and warm water solution into it. Users should tilt the ear getting ear-igated towards their shoulder and hold, or have their friend Cornelius hold, some sort of catch basin underneath the earlobe to catch the water that will trickle out. As the bottle empties, it will draw up wax deposits and drive them out of the ear as well.

Rather than inviting the world into your ears like the Hearing Amplifier, Bose's Quiet Comfort 35 noise-cancelling headphones block it out. So you can listen with perfect clarity and surround sound to all the nuances of your favorite songs and shows or, if you prefer, to nothing at all.

For a trippy sensory experience, activate the Bose Quiet Comfort 35 noise-cancelling feature by itself, either home alone in an already quiet room, or on a walk, at the grocery store, or on an airplane. In the first situation you will feel first hand the strange and eerie and sort of great sound of silence, while in the second, you will feel the strange and eerie and sort of great sound of a cacophonous world turned from 11 down to 3.

They say the flavors we taste are 80% a result of what we smell, making these 2 senses almost inextricably bound when it comes to honing and enhancement. And while not all of us can be supertasters, we all can improve our sense of smell through consciousness and training.

Consciousness involves actions such as taking note of smells when they hit your nose, and naming them out loud, or at least in your head. The name can either be one that's obviously what the smell is (e.g., poo) or one that's meaningful only to you, but that will help solidify the smell in your memory (e.g., Grandma's living room.)

Training your nose involves a little more structure and consistent repetition, such as that the Master Wine Aroma Tasting Kit provides. The box's 88 vials of varying aromas are wine-specific, and intended to help budding wine snobs sync their schnoz holes up with their pie holes. But I think anyone interested in olfactory betterment can use these scents, which range from from gooseberry to caramel, and flint to horse sweat, to achieve their goal.

Sure, you could buy a blind wine tasting kit like this one and just cover up the bottles you're trying to smell and taste your way through. But at one of the maybe 3 fine dining experiences I've had in my life, a sommelier gave my wife and me a slightly different blind tasting test. He poured our first one in a matte black wine glass. It was like drinking blindfolded. We couldn't even see if the wine was red or white or sparkling or still before tasting it. And it wasn't that much easier to tell after.

Once you've mastered your sense of smell - or before you start if you want to know how much work you have to do - grab a set of black glasses and test yourself. If you don't care about or like wine, go for the highball or double old fashioned glasses and use beer. Or spirits. Or even different kinds of sodie or La Croix instead.